WiTricity Corp. Home — Wireless Electricity Delivered Over Dista

Open Innovation: Internet Home Page In Africa's largest slum, a cooker that turns trash into fuel Slum village puts trash to good use In Kibera, a low-tech project uses trash as a resource to produce heat for cookingLocal residents use Community Cooker to prepare meals and heat waterPeople deliver all sorts of garbage in exchange for cooking time Nairobi, Kenya (CNN) -- On the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, mountains of trash are piling up along the dusty streets and footpaths of Africa's largest slum. With local authorities not providing garbage collection in the area, tons of plastic bags, bottles and food waste form a distressing and harmful backdrop for the health of the thousands of people living in Kibera. But in the middle of it all, in the community of Laina Saba, a low-cost project, dubbed the Community Cooker, is helping to clean up the streets. The Community Cooker is a device that uses trash as a resource to produce heat for a large stovetop that local residents use for cooking and heating water.

untitled Do you have old GX260’s in your classroom that feel like more trouble than they are even worth? What about student computers (desktop, laptops, and netbooks) that frequently need to be re-imaged due to the ever present tinkering that helps students understand and use technology systems. You know the students (young and older), they figure out how to delete or hide the toolbar, but haven’t yet figured out how to restore it. Rather than trouble-shooting each challenge that arises, it is much easier to restore the operating system back to the state you originally intended, than to trouble-shoot each issue. Well now there’s a device that enables you to load a computer with all sorts of educational applications in under 5 minutes! Not only that, but if a student tinkers with the computer to the point that it needs to be restored you can give it a soft or hard reset in about 5 seconds. This stick is truly uber. How do I get it? Why Open Source? How do I use the quick recovery features?

Egyptian eco stories: biogas from kitchen scraps and environmentally friendly housing for the poor Cairo, Egypt, photo by mshamma (source: Flickr Creative Commons) In a poor area of Cairo, Egypt, where ‘almost everything’ is reused and recycled, CNN visits one man’s home that is powered by gas from fermented kitchen waste. The biogas unit – which also provides fertilizer – as well as a solar water heating system, were both built by the man himself. He is obviously as skillful as he is dedicated to self-sufficiency. Check out this inspiring report from CNN: CNN Eco Solutions – Making gas from garbage In a related bit of news, here is a CNN Eco Solutions report on a building project in Egypt which constructs efficient, environmentally friendly and inexpensive housing for the city’s poor. Building better and cheaper Additional resources: CNN Eco Solutions

One Laptop per Child Something in the Air(nergy): RCA’s WiFi Charging Device Remember when Nokia came up with the futuristic concept of cell phone batteries that charge via radio waves? Their particular form of charger-less charging wasn’t expected to be available until around 2012. At CES 2010 this month, RCA introduced something even better that’s going to be available way sooner: a dongle that tops up your mobile device’s battery via WiFi signals. Notice we didn’t say that it only tops up your cell phone battery; according to RCA reps, this little fella will work with just about all of your mobile devices. The attachment is efficient enough that it actually provides a noticeable boost to your battery, and given enough time it will charge it to the max. The future applications of the technology are exciting as well.

How the WebOS Evolves? Here is my timeline of the past, present and future of the Web. Feel free to put this meme on your own site, but please link back to the master image at this site (the URL that the thumbnail below points to) because I'll be updating the image from time to time. This slide illustrates my current thinking here at Radar Networks about where the Web (and we) are heading. It shows a timeline of technology leading from the prehistoric desktop era to the possible future of the WebOS... Note that as well as mapping a possible future of the Web, here I am also proposing that the Web x.0 terminology be used to index the decades of the Web since 1990. This makes sense to me. See also: This article I wrote redefining what the term "Web 3.0" means. See also: A Visual Graph of the Future of Productivity Please note: This is a work in progress and is not perfect yet.

Current Technology: Ocean Bot Runs on Geothermal Energy Finding a natural, renewable, eco-friendly way to power machines is the holy grail of propulsion research. A team comprised of university researchers, NASA, and the US Navy recently unveiled an unmanned underwater vehicle that is powered entirely by geothermal energy. The vehicle, called the Sounding Oceanographic Langranian Observer Thermal Recharging (SOLO-TREC) uses the ocean’s changing temperatures to generate power. Thanks to phase change materials which melt at higher temperatures and solidify at lower ones, pressure changes in the engine trigger a hydraulic motor that recharges the vehicle’s batteries. SOLO-TREC is an important breakthrough for marine biology, ocean exploration, and climate study.

The Futurist: A Future Timeline for Automobiles Many streams of accelerating technological change, from energy to The Impact of Computing, will find themselves intersecting in one of the largest consumer product industries of all. Over 70 million automobiles were produced worldwide in 2006, with rapid market penetration underway in India and China. Indisputably, cars greatly affect the lives of consumers, the economies of nations, and the market forces of technological change. I thus present a speculative timeline of technological and economic events that will happen for automobiles. This has numerous points of intersection with the Future Timeline for Energy. 2007 : The Tesla Roadster emerges to not only bring Silicon Valley change agents together to sow the seeds of disruption in the automotive industry, but also to immediately transform the image of electrical vehicles from 'punishment cars' to status symbols of dramatic sex appeal. 2012 : Over 100 million new automobiles are produced in 2012, up from 70 million in 2006.